This is from my experience only while administrating tons of Linux workstations with almost any graphics cards...
1 & 4 bit - very rarely used (unless you're talking about monochrome screens in embedded - by then 4 bit is important for gray scales..)
8 bit - used mostly on old system with old graphics cards when 16 bit & up are slow - I'm talking about graphics chips like : trident 89xx family, ATI Mach 8, Cirrus Logic (all ISA versions), ancient S3 chips, and Number 9 (ISA) - on all of those cards it is better to run XFree in 8 bit or else you'll get a totally slow graphics...
Everything else today on X86 is running at least 8 bit and on 99% - 16 bit and up...
You might want to be careful regarding to 8 bit and up modes - like 15 bit, 24 and 32 bit. I think Matrox old graphics cards (with their 2.3MB RAM) are using packed pixels so it could be a bit problematic...
Hope this helps...
Hetz
On Friday 22 February 2002 01:49, David Hammerton wrote:
Hi,
I'm presently modifying the X11DRV dibsection code for slight speed improvements using shared memory pixmaps and the like. Im into the "clean up and make it work on all systems" stage of thing, and I have a question. Do people ever worry about what happens if the user is running in a 1, 4 or 8 bit X mode? This has some wacky code, which I am unable to test on my machine (or any machine around).. So i'm implementing what I think _should_ do the trick - but I have no idea if it will work..
Is it a big issue? Any suggestions to the problem?
Thanks, David